I know is really too soon but its never to early to plan, right ?

New sound format Dolby Atmos......possible addition ?

Since Atmos is currently just a way for movie business folks to "package,process and present" the audio meta-data for systems of UP TO 128 channels into AS MANY AS 64 discrete speaker feeds it is beyond premature to assumme that ANY home theatre products can begin to exploint the potential...

I do wonder if the sortt of "3D audio remapping" of Trinnov could potentially use "audio metadata" from a filmaker (or audio producer...) to exploit the 5.1 / 7.1 / 11.2 speaker installation that home enthusiasts may have. The potential for SOMEONE with the research / high end experience of Trinnov to really make a huge impact on home audio / theaters seems much more a fruitful product than something design to make movie theaters more "immersive"...

Hey renov8r

I though Atmos would only be for movie theaters since the venues are so large and you cannot have continuity from one wall to the other. In a home environment how many speakers do you need. You would have to have speakers on the ceiling. Wouldn't Audyssey X-32 or Trinnov be enough?

At the first preview of Atmos on Monday in Los Angeles they clearly commented that some version of the Atmos system scaled to the home environment is clearly in the workd. No date was given, but it is definately somethign they are thinking about.

Remember, not all theaters are alike, either. Some have a larger number of speakers than others, and the whole concpet of Atmos is to be able to scale the rendering to the specific system the content is playing back on. The new system in the Dolby Theater is more than a bit outsized given that the venue seats 3,400 people, but when you look at the list of theaters for the first round of installations they vary in size.

The "height" speakers are nice and greatly improve the Atmos presentation, but they are not mandatory. It's a bit of a stretch, but the Dolby people were even talking about a reduced set of the Atmos concept boiled down to phones or other hand-held devices.

"Coming soon to a theater near you".

As an aside, if you want to hear Atmos for yourself, here is a link to the list of theaters where it is installed.

http://investor.dolby.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=681590

As I understand Dolby's use of their "Atmos" terminology it is not a product or a discrete technology. It is hard to pin down the specifics other than its reliance on "meta-data". To my mind that meta data is sorta like the EXIF data that comes along with digital photos. The "Atmos" system then uses the meta-data to map the various channels as laid down by the studio to the various outputs that are available in the cinema. Each film would have the director / sound designers meta-data for each "element" of whatever was recorded. This would allow for far more specific placement in both "real space" and the "virtual sound field".

This is VERY different than Audyssey which is way a measuring room response and making corrections via filters to attempt to make the sound reproduction closer to ideal. Trinnov similarly measures room response and adds in the ability "focus" the reproduction in a way the maximizes the apparent separation / symmetry even of "compromised" speaker placement...

The "future home product" aspect of Atmos certainly seems theoretically viable and if it leverages the sort "refocus" aspects of Trinnov the ability to create "virtual" source locations that could simulate whatever the filmmakers intended. It ought to be possible, just like with Audyssey's various "higher resolution" variants, to be better able to do the "digital mapping" with greater precision but it is not clear yet whether the "raw metadata" is the limiting factor or whether some "processor" of some specific CPU rate / memory bandwidth would serve as the limiting factor...

In reading the literature it appears that the Atmos allows the sound engineer to assign the metadata to the sounds to place them in a certain location which can then be used to accurately decode the sound into a specific area of a theater. This will allow the SE to push a sound to an area regardless of where it was recorded. Kinda like CGI for audio. I wonder how big the metadata file size is for a full length movie and if it is going to be used for all audio or just special effects like explosion, sirens and other discrete sounds.

The stuff on the web I read seems like the whole sound track would have the metadata assigned. No specifics on how big the file would be, just that the whole remix was accomplished with plugins for Avid's ProTools - http://www.avid.com/US/products/family/Pro-Tools/compare

One of the reviews specifically said that dialog was clearer and the mayhem (from the bridge scene in the newest Planet of the Apes movie that was re-mixed from the original stems...) was very immersive...

Atmos is object-based mixing rather than the current channel-based mixing. Each object (sound effect, dialogue, music cue) is tagged with vectors: location in 3D space, movement, size, level, etc. The Atmos processor looks at where the sound is supposed to come from and sends it to the appropriate speaker (or combination of speakers).

If the recording engineer wants dialogue to be heard directly in front, then that object will be sent to the centre speaker. If the set-up doesn't have a centre speaker, it will be sent to the L/R speakers. Whether using a single speaker or combination of speakers, the dialogue will come from the intended direction.

This means that the system is scalable to different numbers of speakers. No need for separate 7.1, 5.1, and 2.0 mixes. Atmos can juggle 128 objects at any given time and feed up to 64 independent speakers. Dolby has said that they'd eventually like to bring the technology home (probably more for gaming than movies), but for the moment it remains for commercial theatres only.

The first movie mixed with Atmos (Pixar's 'Brave') will be out next week. There are about 14 theatres across the country equipped with an Atmos set-up.

Check out the short video:

http://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/technology/cinema/dolby-atmos-video.html